Majestic SEO DOES show more inbound links than Google!

By Dixon Jones
| September 5, 2011

Some pundits suggest that Majestic “doesn’t have as much data as Google”. Changes in Google’s reporting, though, show that when it comes to INBOUND links (as opposed to INTERNAL links which Majestic ignores for reporting), Majestic has the edge. This article shows how Google have changed their link reporting and then shows how far Majestic SEO is ahead.

Google Webmaster Tools have revealed today that they are updating their system by tidying up their link reporting. Unfortunately they are still not showing you as many external links as Majestic SEO does in most examples, however they are making it easier to examine external links.

Before the change:
In the past, Google Webmaster Tools would display all the links from subdomains, for instance it showed example.com linking to www.example.com in the external links report. This is because as the URL was not exactly the same Google Webmaster Tools thinks that it was an external link, when in fact it is the same just without the “www”.

After the change:
Whereas, now all your subdomain links, meaning ones including with and without the “www”, will be regarded as internal links and so you will find them in the internal links report. In terms of blogs for example, your individual blog on wordpress.com, you will see that wordpress.com links not relating to your blog will be counted as external links. The reason behind this is because you can only authenticate the sub domain, i.e. your individual blog instead of the whole of wordpress.

One thing to note is that Majestic SEO does not include internal links in their link count.

So, how many INBOUND/ EXTERNAL/ INLINKS (all the same thing) does Google show for Receptional.com compared to Majestic? Well the separation of internal vs. external links means that Google is removing 799 from its previous number. This leaves the situation as follows:

1: You can only get this number in Google for sites which you control, via Google’s Webmaster interface. The numbers that you can glean on the competition from the main search engine are widely agreed by SEO’s to be highly unreliable. Majestic gives you any site within your subscription level.

2: If you actually try to EXPORT the links from Google, you only get 1 link per domain so in this case 278. With Majestic SEO, Standard reports gives you 7,500 (if we have that many) on a Silver subscription, a massive 20,000 in our standard reports and on a Platinum subscription everything we have in advanced reports if your subscription can handle the processing costs.